Passing on Billboard Liberation: Queerness, Disability, and the Foundation for a Better Life, 3/6

Representations of disability and illness play a large role in the billboard campaign by Foundation for a Better Life. The images script a vision of "community values" and "character development" that will result in a "better life" and future for the United States. A majority of the FBL billboards praise individuals with disabilities for having the strength of character to "overcome" their impairments.

Feminist disabilities scholar Alison Kafer offers a crip reading of these billboards, tracing their construction and surveillance of "failed" bodies, their adherence to a politics of race and gender sentimentality, and their potential subversion by disability activists.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Cosponsored by Student Development & Campus Life and the Women’s Studies Program.